Your Favorite Thing You Ever Wrote

So, the anniversary of a particular occasion in my life is coming up yet again. And, as it does every year, it reminds me of my favorite thing I ever wrote, which appears below the fold.

Yartzheit

A traditional Jewish coffin isn’t sealed shut. Instead, the lid is held in place by two small pegs; one at the head, and one at the feet. Tradition dictates that this is because we wish our loved ones to return to us. Should they return to this waking life, or should the day come that God grants to those who have passed life anew on this earth, we wish to make certain they can do so with as much ease as possible.

At a traditional Jewish funeral, another custom exists. After the service has concluded, attendees and mourners do not simply walk away. A line is formed, and each person in his or her turn scoops up a handful of dirt, and pours it onto the coffin. Each loved one and well-wisher becomes personally responsible for the burial. This theme continues; when visiting a Jewish grave, it is customary to place rocks on top of the headstone or marker. We who have endeavored to make it easier for our dead to return to us take the grave responsibility of trapping them underground very personally. It makes sense; we wish for the physical return of those we miss, but their memories are best left trapped in the earth.

When I was twelve years old, I lost my house key. To teach me my lesson, my parents wouldn’t give me another one for a month and a half. Every day when I got home from school, I would have to go to the neighbors’ house, and patiently wait at their front door for Mrs. Travers to get me their spare key, and then I would have to run across the street, unlock my door, and run the key back. I remember having a mortal fear that in the minute or so that our door was unlocked and I was returning the key, that someone would go into our house and rob us blind, and that it would be all my fault for being too stupid to manage not to lose my keys. My parents’ lesson did its job though; I’ve never lost a key again. In fact, I’ve managed to do a very good job of not losing pretty much anything since then. Except for people. I haven’t done a great job of not losing them.

It is a difficult thing. One wishes to live, that is certain. Any person, myself included, doesn’t live for the moment, or seize the day, no matter how many bumper stickers and t-shirts we buy that tell us to. We spend years at jobs we loathe to make the money to pay the bills, we spend months taking classes we don’t enjoy to expand our knowledge, we spend weeks dating people we don’t love, and we spend hours doing laundry for future days we may never see. No matter how we slice it, one thing is certain: most of the minutes of our lives will be squandered. But we all wish to endure, truly many of us hope in our hearts to live well beyond our span of years. We wish to do so because we have hopes and dreams, and we wish to allow ourselves the opportunity to fulfill them. But that is a hard choice, even if we barely realize we have made it, because it is difficult to mourn. It is hard to lose things one once had. Think about all the people you truly care about. Make a list. Your parents, your siblings, your husbands and wives, your bosom friends. Are you prepared to have to bury them all, to lose them, to miss them for the rest of your days?

I met a man once, in a shitty townie bar about twenty minutes away from my college. He was a touch loaded; well, more than a touch. He started in about “You snotty college kids.” I was in an egalitarian mood, I suppose, but I offered to buy him a bourbon as if I had to make up for it. After two doubles, he asked me if I thought I had become a man yet. With a nice lining of sour mash wrapped around my conscience, I figured he deserved some honest soul-searching, so I rummaged about down there and answered him, with all the truthfulness I could muster, “I don’t know.” He looked right at me, stole one of my cigarettes from the pack I left on the bar, ripped off the filter, struck a match and looked right at me. He said, “I became a man the day my dad first took me out to the tool shed. Everything there is to know about being a man happened to me that day. The look on his face when he took me to the shed, what happened there, and the way he looked at me when he led me back into his house.”

As I stood over Seth’s coffin, I thought back on what that man in the bar had told me. I thought back, upon all the trials and errors, the fine moments and the sad ones, the blessings I had received and the good things snatched away from me far too soon. And I thought about that little boy and his father. I thought about the mixed look of anger and regret on the father’s face as his led his misbehaving son out through the yard to punish him; I thought about the regretful rage that possessed him as he whipped his boy; and I thought about the awkward way in which he tried to welcome his beloved son back into a loving home, the regret and guilt as he tried to atone for his own actions of just a moment before. I bent over and picked up the shovel; it was my turn in the line, and as I bent down, I made certain to notice the way the sun sparkled off of miniscule particles of quartz or something that were mixed into the dirt. I added my sad little scoop of dirt to the pile that was slowly covering the polished mahogany of the coffin, and wondered if the tool shed was the reason God had to fashion himself a heaven, and if that look would be on his face when he came forth to greet me, as he tries to find a way to welcome me back into his loving home.

Thanks for reading this. If anyone feels like sharing their own favorite piece of writing, I’d be eager to see it.

In fact I’m glad you asked that question. Your piece here reminds me of something I might find in my favorite running collection of essays, the Best American series. Maybe you’re familiar with it; I have every year’s edition since 1994 (or at least had each one at some point, they are a bit scattered.)

Docudharma is meant to be a space where such personal essays are appropriate, yes?

Personal pieces evoke personal responses. Yours here, like some of possum’s, had a way of instantly calling up long forgotten events in my own past. Echoes. That is the only measure of such a piece from the outside.

I rarely do personal for the same reason I rarely write letters: there is no obvious place to stop.

As far as my own writing, I’m never satisfied with any of it, but maybe some time I’ll look through and see what looks least defective in hindsight.

i wrote something this weekend that is was going to include in a diary of my own, but im not sure when it’ll be up. if i dont post it there, ill scoot back in an post it here. either way, thanks for the opportunity.

A snippet or two first from the much longer diary, and link to the full post below:

The technical term for the Coquille River is “drowned river estuary”. There is irony in the term, but only for me, perhaps. My father drowned on this river in 1969, after spending almost two decades moving up and down the water, from salt water to fresh and back again. Many days we crossed the river bar to the ocean, he and I, as we towed log rafts out to sea. The inevitableness of it hangs around my mind sometimes, and though I never questioned it out loud as a kid, I often wondered why we towed those logs to sea, when I thought they would likely return on the next incoming tide. I guess my dad knew the flow of the eddies and currents, and that the direction of the wind would likely drive the abandoned debris to more southern reaches of the shore away from the river mouth. I assume this to be the case, though I will never know.

Back to the Coquille. That syrup, I guess, is the mix of things fresh and salty, muddy and dense, liquid and solid sediment. Fresh water is less dense than salt water and when the two meet, wherever they meet because you never really know from one tide to the next where the margin will be between river outflow and tidal incursion, fresh water slides over salt water. On rainy days, that fresh water is filled with debris and mud from erosion upstream and the river flow comes down with force against the incoming salt tide. The resultant sedimentary debris that floats to the bottom of the river changes the under tide pattern of the salt water layer and the bottom of the river is a mercurial and ever changing map, the topology of which is never stable in depth or breadth.

I think of that boat a lot nowadays, when I haven’t for decades. There is something about the story that to me has no ending. It may be because the boat was never found; there was no real closure in the determination of how my father drowned. He was an excellent swimmer, had survived crabbing in the Aleutians in winter, fishing out of Dutch Harbor in the summer season, and working in the Todd Shipyards for many years from the mid 1930’s until the 1950’s. To drown on a stormy river, and not the result of a bar crossing accident, or the swamping of forty foot waves in the Gulf of Alaska – this stalls my mind. In my dreams I am the Wizard of Oz and I give the right gift to everyone, I make everything complete, I offer closure for the most pedestrian of foolish desires. Even mine. I dream I go back and drag the river and find the boat. I see the boat in that sediment, that muddy stew of time and tide. I don’t dream that it gives me answers, I dream that it puts the period at the end of the sentence that now ends with a question mark.

I’ve always lived near water. In twenty-some moves in my life, in three different coastal states, I’ve always either seen water from where I live or I could walk to it. It haunts me and I have fallen in love with it and I cannot leave it behind. There are elements of both ephemera and immutability in the sediment of the Coquille and that is my dad’s true grave. The tide comes in and out and the river bottom ever changes.

Because I often feel the need to randomly incorporate a shading of the political when I post on dKos to legitimize my writing there, I included additional thoughts on Iraq and Bush in the bottom of the original posting. But, someday, though, I’ll re-edit and smooth out the rough spots.

If I were to write it up, it would bear the title Blue Moon Death Trip.

My mother frequented a little dress shop called The Blue Moon. It occupied part of an old building which also housed a mortuary and some empty spaces, all interconnected through their back rooms.

One day when I was seven or eight she drug me along on her shopping trip to the Blue Moon. The place bored me to death, nothing but dresses, so I began exploring and eventually found a really cool place to hide. By prying a panel out a bit and squeezing in, I could effectively hide inside the walls!

But I waited too long. I could hear how frightened they were. This was serious. If I came out now, I’d really be in trouble. What to do? I decided to stay put or rather, frozen.

They closed the shop, convinced I wasn’t there, and the search proceeded all up and down Main Street.

I came out of my hiding place and found myself locked in an empty shop. Searching for some way out, I eventually came out in the mortuary, where along with all the other things I wasn’t supposed to see, there was a dead old man lying on a table. Luckily he was fresh, but I understood that he was dead, and suddenly wanted out, no matter how much trouble it meant.

I returned to the Blue Moon and began banging on the large shop window. This was noticed pretty quickly by passersby on the sidewalk, and I was soon free.

Free, but in the clutches of my mother. I don’t remember much of what followed, except the discussion was no longer whether I should be committed, but where.

That night may very well have been the occasion of an incident I have repressed, but which is remembered very well by siblings. My mother was so at her wits’ end that she lost it, beating me until my father literally pulled her off me. As I say, I have no memory of it, nor of her ever hitting me, but I suspect that was the night.

They were all wrong about one thing though. The mortuary experience they were concerned about didn’t phase me in the slightest. Simply too young.

lost somewhere in one of the novels I threw away. Here is something I wrote a few years ago, when I was living out west. It’s not something I would write, now. But it’s . . . well it’s something, anyway.

Meditation on a Slot Machine in Las Vegas, Nevada

Sit yourself down on the black vinyl stool. Have a sip of gin. If you smoke, shake a cigarette out of its pack. Get comfortable. When you feel ready, hit the “spin” button; have a go at the reels.

Now look into that three-paned window. See all of those ghosts of yourself inside. Some of them married different men, different women. Some of them never married at all. Some are rich, some are happy. Some of them are even wise. There’s the you who stayed in Europe forever, the summer you were twenty-four and went bumming around with a Eurorail pass. There’s the one who ate that tangerine on the beach when it was offered to you.

I think the reason people come to this desert is to commune with these ghosts, with these might-have beens. I think a slot machine is a crystal ball in reverse, in disguise. I think that the allure of gambling has nothing to do with money at all. And I think that people, when they want to commune, have always gone to the desert.

Those of us who live here have been given a wonderful and a perilous gift. When we walk among the tourists, and sometimes when we walk among each other, we walk too with all of their alternate, untested selves. We walk with them as they take chance, and their chances, which is to say their lives, in their hands. They, we, play with their, our, might-have-beens; with the contingency of — with what Milan Kundera called the unbearable lightness of — being. In Las Vegas we are especially vulnerable because it is here that we give our luck a chance to play.

As for me, I would have stayed in California when I had the chance. I would have studied psychoanalysis at Berkeley. I would have woken each morning to a seventy-degree, partly cloudly day and walked to school through a park full of homeless vets and given one of them a dollar. You and I would have stayed together. Eventually we would have had children. I would have set up — and I can see it there in the window on the slot machine — a practice in SOMA or Nob hill. I would have charged one hundred-dollars an hour from people who had never slept on a park bench in their lives.

I think my favorite piece was this short diary about my grandmother. It’s not the best piece of writing, and it was probably way too personal to be posting online (they’d kill me if they ever read it). But a lot of memories wrapped up in that one.

My favorite thing I ever wrote was a paper on Gettier’s
counterexample in an epistemology class in the early
70’s. Took me 1 month of thinking, thinking while
riding the El, walking, going to sleep. It was handwritten
on notebook paper. I don’t understand what I wrote
then, but am still proud of it.